Trump’s Attack On Sanctuary Cities Is Blocked By California Judge

Once again, the courts are rising up to stop Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions from ruining America.

San Francisco and Santa Clara secured a preliminary injunction against the executive orders requiring their police forces to turn over undocumented immigrants to the federal authorities. U.S. District Judge William Orrick delivered a clear win for cities. From his decision:

Federal funding that bears no meaningful relationship to immigration enforcement cannot be threatened merely because a jurisdiction chooses an immigration enforcement strategy of which the president disapproves.

Trump’s own mouth was, again, used against him in court:

In his ruling, Orrick sided with San Francisco and Santa Clara, saying the order “by its plain language, attempts to reach all federal grants, not merely the three mentioned at the hearing.”

“The rest of the order is broader still, addressing all federal funding,” Orrick said. “And if there was doubt about the scope of the order, the president and attorney general have erased it with their public comments.”

By my count, the score is now: Constitution 4 — Trump 0.

Under normal circumstances, conservatives would applaud this ruling. Trump and Sessions are attacking sanctuary cities out of bigotry against immigrants, under the guise of “security” for Americans. But the real issue is and always has been about local control over the police. Sanctuary cities are “sanctuaries” because local law enforcement has determined that relentlessly checking immigration status and punishing those in non-compliance hurts their efforts to police their own communities.

Trump’s federal government is trying to come in and deputize local police, and redirect their efforts towards federal priorities.

That’s not how the system is supposed to work. Normally, conservatives cheer when judges stand up for federalism and local control.

Interestingly, the main argument from the Trump administration wasn’t that they could actually deputize local police and pull non-immigration related funding from cities. Literally, that argument is so stupid that Trump’s lawyers weren’t making it in court.

Instead, team Trump argued that the injunction was premature, because the president was only threatening sanctuary cities in order to bully them into doing the federal government’s bidding.

Republican President Donald Trump was using a “bully pulpit” to “encourage communities and states to comply with the law,” [said Chad Readler, acting assistant attorney general].

I can’t recall seeing the government argue that it had authority to threaten to do something that it probably doesn’t have the authority to actually do. But we live in interesting times.

Trump can appeal to the Ninth Circuit. Again. (MWAHAHAHAHA.) But the injunction should help sanctuary cities from coast to coast.

Still, the battle is not over. Trump has still yet to define what a sanctuary city is, exactly what funding is being threatened, or what “compliance” requires in anything but the broadest terms. One can imagine a carefully tailored executive order that defines its terms and contemplates Constitutional punishments for cities that aren’t in compliance.

Jeff Sessions evidently doesn’t like consent decrees when they are designed to prevent cops from harassing minorities, but maybe he’ll like consent decrees if they encourage cops to harass minorities? I don’t know. Nobody can know. The Trump administration is positively creative when it comes to different ways to attack vulnerable people.

For now, however, Trump’s hasty attempts to slam immigrants through executive action have been blocked again. He better get that wall up, or people might start to notice that Trump is just a bully who can’t get anything done once people stand up to him.

Judge blocks Trump order on sanctuary city funding [Washington Post]

---

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.